Well, we’ve finally arrived at my last Top 10 list for 2011. I hope you’ve enjoyed the previous lists! (Follow these links to check out my Top 15 Movies of 2011: part one, part two, part three, my Top 15 Comic Book Series of 2011: part one, and part two, and my Top 10 DVDs/Blu-Rays of 2011.)
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to put together a Top 10 Episodes of TV list this year. For a whole host of reasons, I don’t watch nearly as much TV as I used to. I’m super-busy, and there just aren’t that many shows that interest me enough to want to watch religiously these days. And a whole heck of a lot of the TV I watched this past year was OLDER TV — in the form of DVD box-sets (of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, The Larry Sanders Show, Party Down, etc.). There’s a lot of current TV that interests me that I just haven’t had time to watch: Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Community, Homeland, Louie (season 2 — I have watched season 1 on DVD and LOVED it — I’ll be posting a review soon), Bored to Death (I also just finished season 1 on DVD and loved it — I’ll be posting a review of this soon, as well, and I’m hoping to get to seasons 2 and 3 soon). All of those shows look interesting and I do hope to eventually sink my teeth in them all via the magic of DVD.
So I felt weird putting together a list, seeing that there’s so much probably-great TV out there that I haven’t seen. But when I sat down to start to compile the list, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily the top ten choices manifested themselves. I guess I DID watch some great TV this year! But keep the above list of TV-I-haven’t-yet-seen in mind when perusing my choices. OK, enough intro, let’s dive in:
10. Game of Thrones: “You Win or You Die” (season 1, episode 7, aired on 5/29/11) – I’ve never read any of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R.R. Martin, and I wasn’t immediately taken by the first few hours of the HBO adaptation. But after a few episodes, the complex fantasy story started to get its hooks in me, and by the time I arrived at this stand-out episode I was loving this show like few other things on TV. Pretty much all of the show’s continuing story-lines jumped to the next level in this installment, which left me absolutely desperate for the next episode to arrive IMMEDIATELY. In this episode,… [continued]
Click here for part one of my Top 15 Movies of 2011 list, numbers fifteen through eleven, and here for part two, featuring numbers ten through six. Buckle up, now, as it’s time for the home stretch, the best of the best (at least in my humble opinion) of 2011!
5. Young Adult – Juno writer and director Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman re-team for a deliciously dark comedy about a twisted, pretty-much irredeemably terrible young woman named Mavis Gary (a magnificent Charlize Theron) who returns to the small hometown she left years before, in an attempt to win back her old jock boyfriend (Patrick Wilson). He’s married with a young baby, but so what? During her week back in town, Mavis bumps into another high school classmate, the nerdy, disabled Matt (Patton Oswalt). The two strike up a weird sort-of friendship, and the way the arc of that pairing avoids any of the typical movie cliche ways that those sorts of relationships usually unfold on-screen is only one way in which this movie is unremittingly awesome. The running gag about the way Mavis wakes up each morning, the terrific chemistry between Ms. Theron and Mr. Oswalt, and that pitch-perfect ending are just a few others. A phenomenal film. (Click here for my full review.)
4. The Adventures of Tintin — Should anyone be surprised that the team-up of cinematic titans Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson produced gold? This deliriously joyful, madcap adventure is non-stop pulpy fun from start-to-finish. The film just zips on by, one incredible sequence after another, with Mr. Spielberg showing us once again how he is an absolute master at staging an action scene and assembling a crowd-pleasing adventure film. The animation is gorgeous, the voice-work is impeccable (highlighted by another brilliant performance by the great Andy Serkis — I also praised his work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, when I wrote about that film earlier on this list), and when the closing credits ran I couldn’t believe the film was over already. This one is going to get a lot of play in my household in the coming years, of that I have no doubt. I can’t wait for the sequel, in which Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson will apparently switch roles (so that Mr. Spielberg will produce the film and Mr. Jackson will direct). (Click here for my full review.)
3. Bridesmaids — Kirsten Wiig and co-writer Annie Mumolo, working with brilliant comedy director Paul Feig (creator of Freaks of Geeks), producer Judd Apatow, and a tremendous cast of women, hit every note exactly perfectly in this comedic home-run. The film is riotously funny and outrageous,… [continued]
Martin Scorsese isn’t exactly the first name I think of when I think about family-friendly adventure films, but with Hugo, the master proves once and again his incredible control of the medium of film, no matter the genre. Hugo is a breathtaking work of genius, and I found myself enraptured by the film’s propulsive energy and the exuberant love for film and, indeed, for all works of art, that pores out of every frame of the movie.
The Hugo in Hugo (adapted from from The Adventures of Hugo Cabret, which was written and illustrated by Brian Selznick) is a young boy living in the walls of a Paris train-station in the 1930′s. His parents are dead, and the uncle who adopted him is a drunkard who eventually abandoned him. But not before teaching young Hugo how to mind all of the clocks in the station, a task which Hugo has secretly continued to do. All the while he has scrounged tools and supplies to work on repairing a broken automata (an elaborate wind-up figure), which he and his father were working on together before his father’s death. When Hugo is caught, mid-theft, by the crochety old man who runs a small toy booth in the station, Hugo agrees to work for him to repay what he has stolen. He is quickly befriended by the intelligent, well-read young girl, Isabelle, in the man’s care. The bond between Hugo and Isabelle grows as they start to realize that the old man, whom she refers to as Papa Georges, hides secrets of his own, including a possible connection to Hugo’s automata.
In my first paragraph I described Hugo as a family-friendly film, but don’t take that to mean that the film is childish or simplistic. Quite the contrary, I found Hugo to be richly layered and nuanced. There is fun adventure to be had as the tale unfolds, but also great sadness and melancholy. (If you’re looking for something to compare it to, in tone, I would direct you to Pixar’s Up.)
Right from the opening frames, the film is gorgeous. Mr. Scorsese uses visual effects with extraordinary aplomb. The opening shots juxtapose the gorgeous city-scape of 1930′s Paris with the complex gears and inner mechanisms of a clock, and the sequence is thrilling and clever. The environment of the city, and of the city-within-the-city that the train station represents, is brought to fully-realized, teeming life. I don’t know where the beautiful costumes and sets end and the computer-generated effects begin, and that’s just the way I like it. Every frame of the film is packed with fascinating imagery — if my eye ever wandered from the main action, there was always… [continued]
And so we come at last to the final installment (for now, at least!) of my “Catching Up on 2010″ series, in which I’ve been writing about all of the 2010 films that I watched in my very busy January attempt to catch up on as many of the 2010 films that I’d missed as possible.
Martin Scorcese’s new film, Shutter Island, didn’t much interest me when it came out last summer. But it was a new Scorsese picture, so it automatically had my attention. I never got around to seeing it in theatres, but I was able to catch up to it on DVD last month.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a US Marshall dispatched, along with his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), to investigate the disappearance of an inmate at Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane located off the coast of Massachusetts. The woman, Rachel, seems to have vanished without a trace from within her locked cell.
Right away from the beginning of the film, I was a bit put off by the over-wrought score. Every beat in those early moments was punctuated by bombastic, creepy music that seemed to state loudly, just in case we missed it, that SHUTTER ISLAND IS EVIL and something REALLY BAD is going on there! I felt that the dour overcast skies, the deranged-looking inmates, the imposing architecture, and the unfolding story would have been more than sufficient to establish a suitably fearsome, unsettled vibe, which is clearly what Mr. Scorsese was going for in those opening scenes. I didn’t think there was any need for the over-the-top score to shove that in our faces.
But once the plot began to unfold I thought the film settled down into a nice rhythm. There are some great actors at play in this film, and I enjoyed watching the mysteries of the story develop and deepen. I was also quite struck by the backstory given to Mr. DiCaprio’s character, Teddy. It turns out that he was involved in the liberation of a concentration camp at the end of WWII, and he is haunted by the atrocities he witnessed — as well as the reprisals against the German soldiers of the camp that he participated in. That particular story point caught me off-guard. I had no idea that the Holocaust played any part in the story of Shutter Island. (The trailers wisely left that tid-bit out.) I was intrigued by this revelation of Teddy’s back-story. It indicated to me that perhaps there was far more going on in Shutter island than just a ghost story, and that Mr. Scorsese and his collaborators (including Laeta Kalogridis, adapting Dennis Lehane’s novel) had more to… [continued]
As with Charlie Wilson’s War (which I wrote about on Wednesday), The Departed is a movie whose DVD has been sitting on my shelf for a while now, waiting for me to revisit it (after really enjoying my first viewing when I saw it in theatres). I am pleased to say I enjoyed the film during its second viewing as much as I did during its first.
The Departed is a sprawling film that focuses on two young men who are, in many ways, the mirror opposites of one another. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Billy Costigan, a state cop assigned to infiltrate the mob run by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), while Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, one of Costello’s men who is assigned to infiltrate the state police. The film deftly follows their two stories, as each one works to make a name for himself in his new world, all the while scrambling to stay one step ahead of discovery. William Monahan’s script is taut and smart, giving DiCaprio and Damon plenty of great character material to work with, while also fashioning a throughly entertaining, twisty narrative. (I am becoming an enormous fan of Mr. Monahan’s writing, by the way. In addition to his work in The Departed, I thoroughly enjoyed his script for Ridley Scott’s criminally-underrated Kingdom of Heaven.)
As good as Damon and DiCaprio are, though, they almost have the movie stolen right out from under them by Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg, who are both absolutely magnificent playing two gleefully profane Boston detectives. Martin Sheen is a great father figure as Police Captain Queenan, and Jack Nicholson — well, he’s Jack! Completely over-the-top but somehow still believable as the dangerous Costello.
Having lived in both Providence and Boston, I really enjoyed the film’s focus on the distinct flavors of those two great cities. I love movies that dig into a particular subculture, whether that’s a documentary such as Spellbound or Wordplay, or a movie like Adventureland (which I reviewed here) that captures the life of kids working a summer job at an amusement park. So it’s no great surprise that I was tickled by The Departed‘s focus on life in Providence and Boston, two cities that are both quite different than, say, New York. Now, I can’t really vouch for the veracity of the depiction of the crime families of those two towns, but I can say that I think Mr. Scorsese and his collaborators really captured the unique FEEL of those two cities.
This is a big story being told, taking place over many years and with a lot of characters and a lot of narrative twists and turns. It is all held together… [continued]